Category: How To

Wikipedia is no doubt one of the best resources for anyone looking to find more information about topics they are researching on. It is also the 5th largest site in the world, however, Wikipedia does not run ads and instead relies on donations from its users to run the huge database of articles it has.

At last count, Wikipedia has over 35 million articles in the English section and there are more documents in other languages too. That’s really good, however, in the past few months, users who visit the website are being shown a banner, which is an urgent appeal from Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder on getting donations for the site.

Now showing this message is fine and many people including me have already donated to them. However, here is the problem, you will see this banner on every page you visit, no matter whether you have donated or not. This is making it quite annoying for users who have to visit Wikipedia everyday.

For Google Chrome

Click on the Setting icon in Chrome and select Bookmark Manager. In the bookmark manager click on Organize and select Import bookmarks. Now select the HTML file you downloaded from Delicious and it will be imported to Google Chrome.

For Firefox

Click on the Bookmarks menu and select "Organize Bookmarks" from the menu. Alternatively you can also use the shortcut key "Ctrl + Shift + B". Click on the "Import and Backup" and select "Import HTML" option. Now navigate to the HTML file you downloaded and import it into Firefox.

For Opera

In order to import your delicious bookmarks to Opera, click on the "Menu -> Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks". In the Bookmarks manager, click on the File Menu and select "Import Firefox Bookmarks" from the list. Now navigate and select the downloaded HTML file from Delicious and import it into Opera.

For Internet Explorer

Go to "File -> Import and Export" and select Import from a file. Click on Next and select "Favorites" on the next screen. Click next and select the downloaded HTML file and then choose the folder you want to import the bookmarks into.

Done, you now have your Delicious bookmarks in your favorite browser. Now how about moving it to Xmarks? Turns out it is easy, check the steps below.

Import Delicious Bookmarks to Xmarks

Xmarks provides an easy way to import your bookmarks from Delicious to your account. Login to your Xmarks account and then head over to http://my.xmarks.com. Now click on the "Tools" menu and select "Import Bookmarks from Del.icio.us". Provide your Delicious username to Xmarks and it will download your bookmarks and add it to a new folder.

The downside of this feature is that it only supports 100 public bookmarks, so your private Delicious bookmarks and those which are above 100 won’t be imported. To get over this problem you can simply download a sync tool for your browser from here and then sync your imported bookmarks in the browser to Xmarks.

Import Delicious Bookmarks to Diigo

Another good service for bookmarking is Diigo. You can also import your delicious bookmarks to this service. To import your bookmarks to Diigo, sign in to the service and head over to this link. Now navigate to the downloaded HTML file and upload it to Diigo.

Using these import guide will ensure that your Delicious bookmarks are not lost.

I love the concept behind Tynt, it is a service which adds a Read more link when you copy content from certain sites. However, the problem here is that it is also truly annoying and hurts my productivity, since I have to keep deleting all that additional data added to my copied text.

To restore my productivity levels I searched for ways to disable them from adding the additional content to my text. First of for Google Chrome Users, there are couple of extensions which block the Tynt script. You can download the Tynt Blocker extension from here or also try out the Tynt Blocker 2 extension from here.

Unfortunately there are no Tynt blockers for Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer. However, I did find an alternative to block Tynt completely on all browsers thanks to Daring Fireball. All you have to do is edit your hosts file and add a new line to it as shown below.

If you went on a app installing spree, the new tab page feels a bit cluttered. However, you can uninstall Chrome Apps or Extensions easily without having to break your head.

To uninstall an Chrome App that you installed, open a new tab and scroll till you see the app you want to uninstall. Now, right click on that app, and click on "Uninstall" from the available options. Click on the "Uninstall" button in the popup window and the app will be removed. The good thing is that if you use Chrome Sync, the app will be removed across the board on all the computers you use.

To uninstall an extension in Google Chrome, Click on the Settings icon and then click on Extensions from the Tools sub-menu. This will take you to the extensions page, alternatively you can just type chrome://extensions in the browser address bar. On the extensions page, you will see all the installed extensions. You can either disable an extension or remove it entirely by clicking on the available links below the extension description.

Have fun and do try out new extensions and apps that Chrome Web Store.

Twitter is a place for everyone to communicate their feelings with no one in particular. However, at times some people you follow could go on a tweet rampage or there could be a barrage of tweets for some #hashtag which can get annoying. Unfollowing those people is an easy option to stop seeing their tweets, but what if you could just temporarily not view those tweets from a person or for a #hashtag on your timeline?

Desktop software like TweetDeck already provide you with an option to filter tweets, however, it you cannot do it on the web though. Twitter Filter is a handy extension for Google Chrome which allows you to temporarily filter out tweets from certain users in the web interface.

As you can see from the screenshot above, this extension will allow you to exclude tweets that contain a certain #hashtag, as well as tweets from one or more people. This is a great way to temporarily hide tweets instead of using the Unfollow button.

Firefox users can make use of some Greasemonkey scripts to filter out tweets from your Twitter web timeline. You can install the Filter Tweets script for Greasemonkey and use it to filter out keywords or people’s tweets from your timeline temporarily. One benefit of using this script is that you can also filter out all tweets which contain links.

Recently one of our readers emailed us that their Outlook installation was having a problem after installation, here is what they had to say:

I purchased MS Outlook 2003 on 12/2/2010 and installed it today 12/3/2010. When I attempted to open it I got the error message that says " Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. MAPI32.DLL is corrupt or the wrong version. This could have been caused by installing other messaging sorftware (sic). Please reinstall Outlook." I have tried reinstalling Outlook and I keep getting the same message. Please inform me how to fix this.

If you are facing a similar error, there is a quick fix for this. All you have to do is Open windows explorer and navigate to "C:\Windows\System32" without the quotes and double-click on the "Fixmapi.exe" file. This should fix your error and allow you to use Outlook.

Alternatively you can press the Windows and R key simultaneously and then type "C:\Windows\System32\fixmapi.exe" without the quotes to fix this issue.

Note: The folder might be hidden by default, so you will have to go click on certain warnings to view the folder. You can also copy paste the path above in your Windows explorer address bar. Make sure to change the drive if it is different.

Dropbox, one of the best file sync tools for Windows, Linux and MAC computers does not provide the ability to sync any file or folder outside the “My Dropbox” folder. While you can always choose a custom location for the “My Dropbox” folder, it would have been better if Dropbox could sync any folder placed anywhere on your computer’s hard drive.

Let’s say you have chosen “F:\My Dropbox” as the installation path of your “My Dropbox” folder. You have a bunch of documents and videos stored in the D drive, which you want to sync with your Dropbox account.

In such situations, you have to copy all the files from the D drive and paste it in the My Dropbox folder e.g “F:\My Dropbox\Videos”.

Symbolic Links and Dropbox

As a workaround, you can use the concept of symbolic links to sync any file or folder with your Dropbox account.

A symbolic link is a special type of file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path. A symbolic link merely contains a text string that is interpreted and followed by the operating system as a path to another file or directory.

Here are the step by step instructions to use Symbolic links With Dropbox:

1. Click the Start menu, type “cmd” in the search box and run it as administrator.

2. In the command prompt window, enter the following command:

MKLINK /D path_to_your_my_dropbox_folderpath_to_folder_to_be_synched

Example: If your “My Dropbox” folder is located in C:\My Documents\My Dropbox and you want to sync D:\Videos with your Dropbox account, you have to enter the following command:

MKLINK /D C:\MyDocuments\MyDropbox\videosD:\videos

3. Hit the return key and a symbolic link of the chosen folder will be created within your “My Dropbox” folder. You can navigate to your My Dropbox folder and see whether the symbolic link has been created or not.

All set, now run the Dropbox client and it will sync files and folders as it normally does. All the files and folders stored in the custom folder will get synced with your Dropbox account via symbolic links.

Note: Deleting the symbolic link from your “My Dropbox” folder will not delete the actual files and folders that are contained in the actual folder. You can add as many symbolic links as you want, there are no restrictions as such.

Overall, this is one of the best ways to sync any file or folder with your Dropbox account. Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments section.

There are times when you will receive an email from someone you were not anticipating communications from and then jump out of your seat because you received a good news. However, it could be that someone is playing a prank with you and the email address for that user might not even exist.

Of course there are ways to determine whether an email is fake or not by looking at the email headers, but what if you want to verify whether an email address exists or not? Turns out there is a way to do it, albeit a bit geeky.

Amit Agarwal has posted an interesting post where he details determining whether or not an email address exists using a clever trick with telnet. The trick requires you to connect to an email server using telnet and then pinging to see if that email address exists.

If you are interested in knowing more, go ahead and visit the post by Amit at Digital Inspiration. For a quick how-to check out the embedded video below.

Please note that this may not work always as email servers block such queries so that spammers cannot fish legitimate email addresses from their databases.

Another problem being faced by users and also being actively discussed in the Apple forums is the 1013 error which occurs after upgrading to iOS 4.2. However, thanks to a member, Dave, there is a fix for this problem.

Here is a step-by-step instruction to fix the iOS 4.2 1013 error after the upgrade:

Go to your “Applications” folder

Go to your “Utilities” folder

Launch “Terminal”

Type “sudo nano /etc/hosts” (without quotes) and hit return

Enter your password

Use the down arrow key to find the “gs.apple.com” entries. Once the cursor is in front, make sure you comment out the line(s) by entering “#” (no quotes) in front of the text

Save the file by pressing CONTROL+O on the keyboard

Exit the nano editor by pressing CONTROL+X on the keyboard

Restore your iDevice

For users with Windows PC, you will have to follow change the hosts file in %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\. You might want to visit our earlier post on downgrading iPhone which has an active discussion and instructions on making this change.